CHANGING OUR LIVES BY CHANGING OUR NEIGHBORHOODS
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> This piece explores how to help neighborhoods deal with burgeoning complexity and proposes a potential and highly practical solution, Local Agora.
> The ideas presented here are handy and useful for most of us, not just businesses and governments. If we get it right, these ideas and practices will go viral.
# Our neighborhoods can be the places that make us happy.
Some of us hope to go back to better times. Others of us hope to leap into new and better times. My goal is for us to create today what we really desire.
Social bonds, like chemical bonds, are affected by Spatial Configurations—the arrangement of seating, where the administrative offices are placed, location of coffee shops, distance between houses.
# FAMILIAR SOCIAL ENZYMES I studied chemistry and started a PhD in biochemistry because I like the way biochemistry works. I could understand it and it mirrors the sociopolitical world as I see it.
Enzymes combine or cleve molecules through the attraction, orientation, and temporary placement. This manipulation of molecules dramatically changes **rates of interaction**—meta control is managed through the amount of enzyme or configuration of enzymes.
Pathology in any of these aspects unbalances the situation producing too much or too little of an essential component to the life of the organism.
Almost all metabolic processes in the cell need enzymes in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life. (Wikipedia accessed Oct 27, 2017).
So here is **my big point**. Institutions are moving faster than neighborhoods and they take advantage of this speed (often called efficiency). As a result of their speed they often over take, and take over, functions that would be better performed by slower moving neighbors in neighborhoods.
My belief is that institutions have a certain social and physical configuration which allows them to be Catalytic. They can be thought of as **socio-physical enzymes**.
# My intention is to create and support Catalytic Communities through faster and better enzyme-like configurations that work in voluntary situations, specifically neighborhoods, and out perform less adaptable settings, specifically top down hierarchical institutions.
# BEGINNING Societies are beginning to become overwhelmingly complex, but we don't know how to think about and work with complexity yet. We don’t yet know **how to participate in massive complexity**. Some of us turn a blind eye to it and are swept along. Others, comfortable with a slower simpler time, try to withdraw, or even attempt to stop it or slow it down.
Incalculable complexity is surfacing increasingly at the social level. For example: culturally, we have moved from English freemen and serfs doing the farming with hand tools, to industrialized mechanization, then to complete industrialization, which has transformed farms into global agribusinesses. As the world becomes more and more interconnected we experience the consequences. There is an explosion of combinations of interactions driving the complexity we are experiencing. The numbers, the density, and the rapidity of communication between people, across cultures and continents begin to create patterns similar to those we have discovered in physics, chemistry, and biology. One hundred years ago we began to understand the overwhelming complexity present in physics, chemistry and microbiology.
In physics, chemistry and biology, we can appreciate the role of time and movement and speed. The smaller that things are, the faster they tend to move. At the atomic and molecular level things move very fast and unpredictably. At the subatomic levels of physics there are lots of things moving even faster. At all these levels things are running into one another, changing, transforming, combining, breaking. The resulting macroscopic behaviors, the behaviors of large chunks, show up as kinds of averages, obscuring the mechanisms and the unimaginable variation below the surface of those visible chunks.
# MASTERING COMPLEXITY Something interesting happens between the scales of chemistry and biochemistry—that is **between chemistry and biology**. This something may hold a key to the mastery of social complexity.
It is easy to unreflectively assume that everything in the universe is happening at the speed of our own experiences, at the speed of human thought and conversation and bodily motion. Such a default assumption occurs because we tend to imagine things by analogy with our embodied experiences. (Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff)
At first we are always a little surprised when we notice that things move much slower or much faster than we do.
How to manage complexity? That is a most interesting and urgent question. How can our human purposes be realized in a massively complex social world--when most of our political explanations and **strategies are decidedly non-complex, overly simple, and sometimes simply hopeful**.
It seems likely that some of our purposes only have a chance to be developed in slower settings. Examples: Fijian Bures and Syntegration.
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One thing seems certain, we cannot slow the whole thing down--we cannot move the physical or social world toward some social equivalent of absolute zero, the temperature where molecules are immobile. But we probably can **slow down, hold near, hold out, cool off if we create appropriately designed spaces**.
Enzymes are my ideal example of **designed spaces that control complexity**. Enzymes amaze me. They change the game, more accurately they create the games. They make the most statistically improbable events become routine. They are masters of chemical complexity. They make life possible. Enzymes create micro-neighborhoods by putting specific desired neighbors into close proximity. Enzymes, in effect, remove the noise and distractions of movement and allow the chemical reactions (conversations and agreements) to occur that are likely to occur only when these two neighbors are interacting together without distraction for long enough. These new covalent chemical bonds (binding contracts) tend to hold for a long time.
So, for a given purpose or a given set of purposes **what analogue to enzymes can we devise?**
# HUMAN WELLBEING What potentials and purposes are essential for human wellbeing on a planet whose own wellbeing must also be preserved? Aristotle and Ackoff both claim that every social system has four necessary and sufficient parts which interact to create the specific social system. These are four pretty high level purposes each of which is aided or degraded through interactions with each of the others. The parts of this system are Aesthetics (Aristotle’s “Beauty”), Ethics ("Good"), Science ("Truth") and Production ("Economy"). Aesthetics is most fundamentally human, primary, primordial, and unexplainable. It influences us when identifying, motivating, rationalizing, striving and self-justifying. To my way of understanding, the other three are derivative, or can be derived from Aesthetics. Aesthetics cannot be reliable derived from the others, only supported or degraded. I believe that:
**Aesthetics (Beauty):** Human passion for beauty is the wellspring, the life giving motive force of a human being. What do we care enough about to create it and sustain it? Beautiful places, beautiful food, beautiful minds, beautiful logic, beautiful artifacts, and beautiful ways of being together.
**Ethics (Good):** I believe that Ethics is the way we attempt to ensure that Aesthetics are available to each other. At its most fundamental, Ethics is Fairness. Ethics also relates to Science (Truth)—everyone should have access to Truth to be Fair. Ethics also applies to Economy. Production should in some way be fair or equitable.
**Science (Truth):** I believe that Science is a way to increase the likelihood of producing what is Aesthetically pleasing and not its opposite- ugliness, deadness. Science is a way of knowing, understanding, and deciding how things are and how things work. Beyond Aesthetics, Truth must be shared to support both Ethics (fairness) and Economy.
**Production (Gift, Economy, Market, Exchange):** A way of creating what is beautiful (desirable) while honoring what is ethical (fair) and what is true (technically possible).
So back to social complexity and enzymes. These four—Aesthetics, Ethics, Science, and Production—are our social systems’ parts. Human purposes, social purposes and social actions must have a **Human Pace** that is dependent on the human form--speech, conversation, understanding, agreements; movement of hands and feet, the speed of breathing and talking in sentences, thinking thoughts, waiting for associations and insights, finding likely partners, planning, navigating, checking, learning, back-tracking, celebrating, weeping. Human emotions and moods have a cadence, a rhythm that runs in hours to days and sometimes months. Moods and emotions are slow biological systems. So **we need enzyme-like settings that protect against inhuman speed**, that remove distractions—the pushing and pulling of irrelevancies.
# THREE COMPLEXITY FILTERS **Strategies for eliminating worthless choices:**
**1 RELEVANCE** In managing human complexity, relevance is the first and biggest filter to apply. It is the first step toward reducing complexity. By focusing only on what is relevant, by omitting or positively excluding the irrelevant, the largest set of interactions and distractions are removed.
**2 LOCALNESS** From my point of view, most of the truly human forms of beauty are local and intimate. At this scale we are in contact with many things— dirt, water, sunlight, paths, visible landscapes, fauna, friends and foes, hand tools, gatherings, conversations, listening, understanding, market places, homes, work places.
The creation of Aesthetics (Beauty) needs Agoras—places where we have conversations about what we care about, where we make shared commitments and take action together, and where through trial-and-error we safely learn what we are capable of together.
**3 SLOWNESS** Slowing down is essential wherever and whenever it makes sense to pursue more **beautiful, just, true, and productive** interactions with others in our neighborhoods. We must create and sustain our own enzyme-like places to provide space, time, and attractions for actors and actions, **places and methods** that ensure that the right people are sitting next to each other for long enough. Within our neighborhoods, we must design enzyme-like locales for our human-scale and human-speed interactions, without ignoring the increasingly complex, interconnected, interacting, potentially overwhelming environment that includes every person and institution on earth.
# PLACES I imagine neighborhoods enabled with agora and mechanisms fit for Local and Slow. These neighborhoods will begin to design their relations with other neighborhoods, each supported by its own enzyme-like agora. The **big idea** here is **catalytic spaces** that protect and support the essential rate and nature for human beauty creation, where we gradually replace our ugly, top down approaches to managing complexity—often crudely done through amputations and blunt restrictions—propped up with misconceived claims of efficiency, practicality, and affordability. Affordability, practicality and efficiency should be defined and managed at the slow and local levels, supported and protected through our enzyme-like neighborhood places.
# PARTICIPATION Participation, creative participation, among people is the **antidote to the Alienation** which results from consuming things you have had no hand in making and listening to people you can never sit with and get to know.
Affection (Aesthetics, Love) can lead to Respect and Curiosity, these three together can lead to amazing Wellbeing and Productivity (Flourishing) that honors people and planet. **We must create enzyme-like places in our neighborhoods and communities to keep affection, respect, and curiosity in play within an increasingly interconnected and complex world.** In this way we may master complexity—we can create desirable lives and communities within this complex world.
# EXAMPLES I will offer three examples of successful enzyme-like local agora. # QULTURUM **First:** There is an almost magical county in Sweden where an enzyme-like place was designed and built in 1998. The building is named Qulturum. People meet there and learn how to learn. They “act into knowing” according to Göran Henriks, the director of Qulturum since its inception. Their health system results have become famous. Healthcare and government leaders make the pilgrimage here from across the world. Many try to imitate it. I have traveled there four times, a week at a time, to understand what the dynamics are around this place—Qulturum.
Municipalities of Jonkoping County, Sweden
As successful as Jonkoping County Council and Qulturum have been, they only attract the medical sector—they are indelibly labeled with their original mission, to improve the medical system. The thirteen municipalities that have jurisdiction over schools, transport, eldercare, social services, and more, have not yet been attracted to the place or its methods. This problem with **branding must be dealt with at the inception** as it is very difficult to change people minds or adapt methods to different cultures when they feel left out.
# HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL Second: Miles Horton and his Highlander Folk School is the place from which both the unionization of the Southeastern US and the civil rights movements originated. There are documentaries and books that share the remarkable story. I highly recommend that you look in to the history and the effect that Highlander has had. It was a designed place, an enzyme-like place, where specific people were invited, placed in proximity, slowed down, held together, until something binding happened between them. From each other, these people learned how to learn. Then they went back to their places and continued learning how to learn by talking and taking action together, again and again.
Highlander Folk School has been renamed, Highlander Research and Education Center. It is twenty-three miles, a thirty minute drive, east of Knoxville, TN, near the town of New Market, TN.
As successful as Miles Horton was, his approach never reached his highest hope. He was seeking something more universal, even more effective. My conclusion is, while Horton rejected the overt confrontational approach used by his friend, Saul Alinsky, Horton none-the-less still relied on opposition and antagonism, for fuel, for Motivation. His approach could never become a universal approach because, **lacking an enemy whom you are willing to confront, there was no motive and no method**.
# I think that what is needed is an emotionally compelling (exciting) and unifying positive, rather than just negative, source of Community Power.
Russ Ackoff gave us that possibility—Idealized Design.
# CAMPFIRES AND FIJIAN BURES Third and final example: Possibly the oldest human scale enzyme-like human space is a fire at the mouth of a cave where our ancestors sat and talked and listened. These may have been the original spaces of social cohesion and social innovation. While sailing among the islands of Fiji I was privileged to sit many evenings among small groups, always passing a half coconut shell of kava around the circle, each person randomly speaking to the center, to no one and to everyone, about nothing and everything. In these villages, over months, I never saw a crying child, I saw no conflict, I saw everyone lending a hand, I saw no overt governance. I saw smiles everywhere. Something magical has been happening here for a long long time.
# AMERICAN CATALYTIC AGORA The first two examples are presented because they have each been remarkably successful—where so many other efforts have failed. My criticism of Qulturum and Highlander is only to **anticipate a uniquely American agora**: Catalytic Agora are special communal places, which must be safe enough for voluntary participation, must not be built on antagonism and must not be experienced as exclusive. They must produce their own trust. Importantly, they must provide and support critical enzyme-like mechanisms, which I detail in other essays.
These methods and tools which can support community-scale mechanisms include: Community Linkage Mappings, Ackoff’s Idealized Design, Beer’s Viable Systems Model, Vester’s Sensitivity Model,and Beer’s Syntegration. There is a likely **sequence:**
* local creation of relevant Linkage Maps, * Idealized Design for small projects, * Syntegration for large projects. * Viable System Model for diagnosis and healing of structural weaknesses. * Vester’s Sensitivity Model for agreement on sequence in large projects.
I currently imagine the first agora **housed in our school buildings** after hours--grade schools, middle schools, high schools, and community colleges. These places already have local relevance, are generally non-threatening and they support the development of our children, the very people most dear to families and neighbors—our embodied future.
So we may bring to our school buildings the relevant methods and tools to support our aspirations and our neighbors'. Nothing heavy handed. Always emergent, built upon passion, and trusting one another.
Public libraries are another possibility.
**Campfires and bonfires are different.** Campfires do not scale up. Around campfires people have a pace and space for slow conversations and sharing subtle details. People can think and plan together around campfires. Bonfires allow only short loud interruptions over the pervasive noise of the fire. The scale and **the heat of bonfires** separate people while holding them within a harsh light. People can be moved to coarse actions by bonfires. All subtlety is lost.
# SUMMARY What was this piece about?
# Next Step: Agora phase two: Operations Rooms for neighborhoods.
# Author: Marc Pierson, protected by Community Commons —Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)